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Modern history

In October 1934 the northern Spanish region of
Asturias was the scene of the most important outburst of revolution in Europe
between the early 1920s and the Spanish Civil War. Thousands of left-wing
militants took up arms and fought the Spanish army in the streets of Oviedo
while in the rear-guard committees proclaimed a revolutionary dawn. After two
weeks, however, the insurrection was crushed and the widespread repression was
central to the polarization and fragmentation of Spanish politics prior to the
Civil War (1936-9).

Weaving together a range of everyday disputes and arenas of conflict, from
tenant activism to strikes, boycotts to political violence, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! reveals how
local cleavages...

The war of 1914–18 was the first great conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods to the field of battle. In Civilian Specialists at War, Christopher Phillips examines the manner in which Britain’s industrial society influenced the character and conduct of industrial warfare. This book analyses the multiple connections between the military, the government and the senior executives of some of pre-war Britain’s largest companies. It illustrates the British army’s evolving response to the First World War and the role to be played by non-military expertise in the prosecution of such a conflict.

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century, peaking in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though ‘going to the pictures’ remained a popular pastime, the transition to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the 1950s increased affluence, the growth of television ownership and the diversification of leisure led to rapid declines in attendance. Cinema attendances fell in all regions, but the speed, nature and extent of decline varied widely across the United Kingdom.

By linking national developments to detailed case studies of Belfast and Sheffield, this book adds nuance to our understanding of regional variations in film exhibition, audience habits and...

The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household’s public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V’s first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s approach to publicity.

This book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty’s new media image. It argues that the monarchy’s deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these...

How is emptiness made and what historical purpose does it serve? What cultural, material and natural work goes into maintaining ‘nothingness’? Why have a variety of historical actors, from colonial powers to artists and urban dwellers, sought to construct, control and maintain (physically and discursively) empty space, and by which processes is emptiness discovered, visualised and reimagined?

This volume draws together contributions from authors working on landscapes and rurality, along with national and imperial narratives, from Brazil to Russia and Ireland. It considers the visual, including the art of Edward Hopper and the work of the British Empire Marketing Board, while concluding with a section that examines constructions of...

Professor Senia Pašeta argues that our understanding of
modern Irish and British politics would be enormously enriched if we recognized
two things: that the Irish and British suffrage movements were deeply
connected; and that the women’s suffrage movement across the United Kingdom was
shaped in fundamental ways by the Irish Question from the late nineteenth
century and into the twentieth. In other words, the women’s suffrage movement
did not exist in a political vacuum. It interacted with, influenced and was
influenced by the other main political questions of the day, and with the main political question of the
day - Ireland.

Historical
research has dispelled a number of myths surrounding Word War I:
whereas the outbreak of war was greeted by the urban middle classes with
frenzied enthusiasm, in working-class areas and smaller towns the mood
was more of
foreboding. Little attention has so far been paid to those who opposed
the war and its underlying culture of militarism, though opposition to
war and militarism has a distinguished German pedigree. This volume explores opposition to war and
militarism among a range of German-language authors in a period roughly
defined by two international bestsellers: Suttner’s 'Die Waffen nieder' (1889) and Remarque’s 'Im Westen nichts
Neues' (1928). Major figures (Kraus, Schnitzler, Zweig) have...

This volume reassesses the life and work of Octavia Hill, housing reformer, open space campaigner, co-founder of the National Trust, founder of the Army Cadet Force, and the first woman to be invited to sit on a royal commission. In her lifetime she was widely regarded as an authority on a broad range of social problems. Yet despite her early pre-eminence, and the remarkable success of the institutions which she helped to found, Hill fell from public favour in the twentieth century. This book provides a nuanced portrait of Hill and her work in a broader context of social change, reflecting recent scholarship on nineteenth-century society in general, and on philanthropy and preservation, and women’s role in them, in particular.

This volume explores developments in health and social care in Ireland and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The central objectives are to highlight the role of voluntarism in healthcare, to examine healthcare in local and regional contexts, and to provide comparative perspectives. The collection is based on two interconnected and overlapping research themes: voluntarism and healthcare, and regionalism/localism and healthcare. It includes two synoptic overviews by leading authorities in the field, and ten case studies focusing on particular aspects of voluntary and/or regional healthcare in Ireland and Britain.